My wife and I were listening to one of his four core messages on Freedom Ministry called “The Kingdom of God” taught by Pastor Bob. In it, he shares a modern-day parable that I wanted to share with you.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a radio station. Around us are thousands of radio signals that carry messages. Yet, we can’t hear those radio signals with our ears. The radio waves are transmitting right this very moment through our body, our brains, our being. Yet, you cannot see them, hear them, feel them–unless we have a receiver.

The receiver is a special electronic device that tunes into a specific frequency, and then converts those indiscernible radio waves into a different form that we can hear with our ears. But, without a receiver, there’s nothing to hear.

God’s voice is a lot like those radio waves. He’s “broadcasting” his love, his compassion and his faithfulness into our hearts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all the time. But, are our hearts tuned in? Or, have we “hardened our hearts” from receiving God’s love? Or, has the enemy gotten us off-tune so that we can’t hear the message of God’s love?

One of my electrical engineering classes at college was the study of radio waves. We had this device called a spectrum analyzer. With it, we could sweep the frequency spectrum looking for broadcast signals. They were obvious from the spike. But, when no signal was present, you could see this thing called the “noise floor”.

There’s no such thing as zero noise–there’s always something there called radio noise. It’s a phenomenon where random, non-broadcasted signals are generated by a variety of naturally occurring sources–sun flares, noisry electronic equipment, cosmic noise, photons, etc. As you would sweep the spectrum on the analyzer, you would move through the noise floor looking for a very clear spike. That spike was the signal broadcast.

God’s voice is a lot like that. We often sweep the “noise floor” of our mind, thinking we’re picking up certain broadcasts, but often we find that it’s just noise. Maybe it’s noise from wounds in our hearts. Maybe it’s noise from the distractions of the day. Maybe it’s noise from the enemy.

Lately, I’ve been wrestling with this issue of spiritual noise in my life. I’ve drifted from hearing God’s voice clearly. I’m not tuned in, and I’ve spent weeks trying to tune back into the Voice. I know it’s there, and I know that tuning into it requires discipline. It also requires that I put aside the distractions.